Mobile Carriers in the United States

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FWIW, I'm testing with Mint Mobile which offer $5 trial SIM cards that work for 1 week. I even got one for just $1 at Best Buy.

I checked the IMEI and they support PinePhone:

"Congratulations! Your phone is pretty boss and will receive our fastest data speed—4G LTE!"

Watch this space.

Excellent !

I bought one of their SIM's on Amazon (yes, $1) just to have a SIM so the modem chip would test, ... I have been holding off on activation until call / text functionality had gotten better.  Maybe now is the time, woohoo !

Thanks for the confirmation, I had been wondering ...

More later ...

Yes! Well since we're in the same boat, right now I'm trying to figure out how to set up APN settings detailed here -- don't be fooled, you don't need to install an app to configure APN like they are pushing us to do. We just need to put the information into the right configuration file or if one of the OS's already has the interface for it we can enter the information in a similar way. I have a sense that it has something to do with ofonoctl and modemmanager. I did some research and these links seem useful:

Configuring Cellular Connections
ModemManager documentation
Configure Cellular Connections
NetworkManager documentation
Manpage of mmcli 
Nokia N900 (nokia-n900) - postmarketOS

Also these threads: 
Howto: Mobile data on pmOS + Phosh with APN requiring user/pass
How to Send a SMS text trough the command line
New Phosh image - first impressions

If we can configure APN settings via command line in one OS then we should almost be able to do with all.

P.S. It will also be necessary I guess, to have a script that turns off the modem before the device shuts down, to prevent firmware corruption, see this thread for Ubuntu Touch, not sure yet what to do with other OSs, but if using ofonoctl I think it would be a script with something like:

$ ofonoctl offline
$ ofonoctl poweroff

and set it to run before shutdown.

Ignore me. This all seems to be mostly useless